January 15, 2015 – Links International Journal of Socialist
Renewal -- The ideas of Karl Marx are often put forward as an invaluable
resource for those wishing to understand the world in order to change it for
the better. Yet various people who speak as Marxists often insist upon
divergent ways of understanding even the most basic concepts associated with
Marxism – such as capitalism and the working class.

This article* examines the extent to
which Green parties can be considered social-democratic formations. The
Australian Greens, since 2010 in de facto governmental coalition with the Labor
Party, are posited as an important case study of the global Green party
movement. The Australian Greens have generally been seen as a far-left party,
as expressing the views of the new social movements or as a site of tension
between these two tendencies.

I. Lenin's aims in writing this work

The term "imperialism" came into common usage in England in the 1890s
as a development of the older term "empire" by the advocates of a major
effort to extend the British Empire in opposition to the policy of
concentrating on national economic development, the supporters of which
the advocates of imperialism dismissed as "Little Englanders". The term
was rapidly taken into other languages to describe the contest between
rival European states to secure colonies and spheres of influence in
Africa and Asia, a contest that dominated international politics from
the mid-1880s to 1914, and caused this period to be named the "age of
imperialism".

The first systematic critique of imperialism was made by the English
bourgeois social-reformist economist John Atkinson Hobson (1858-1940) in
his 1902 book Imperialism: A Study, which, as Lenin observes at
the beginning of his own book on the subject, "gives a very good and
comprehensive description of the principal specific economic and
political features of imperialism" (see below, p. 33).

Lenin had long been familiar with Hobson's book. Indeed, in a letter
written from Geneva to his mother in St. Petersburg on August 29, 1904,
Lenin stated that he had just "received Hobson's book on imperialism and
have begun translating it" into Russian.(1)